Curator's perspective: Beauty

Beauty waits for us in a darkened room. The light above sets a stage occupied by only a mist of water, a long veil, a where we see colours of gold and brown, blue and violet, perhaps brief moments of green.

As we move around the space, the rainbow and effects of colour shift and change, they shimmer. It is our movement that brings the full dynamism of this sense of colour and light to the artwork. Each of us will see a different rainbow depending upon our height, and how we move through the space. If you move to the side of the work and pass behind the veil of water, or in fact, step right through it, perhaps reach out to touch it and move through the veil, you'll discover that from behind there is no rainbow. Simply a mist lit in a golden white light. And you can look back to the light itself.

Olafur always likes to reveal the mechanics, and the elements that make up his artworks. He reminds us in a little drawing, or sketch, created to show how this artwork operates, that we ourselves are critical: the viewer, our eye, our movement.

We are just as much a part of the work as the water, the mist, the light, and the circulation system that allows the water to drain through the floor mats and cycle back from behind the walls up into the hose and system above. So, Olafur takes mechanisms that might power our cities, to create something that lifts the phenomena of nature, a rainbow, such as you might see on a rainy day, arcing across the horizon, perhaps in a moment where the clouds behind us break open and allow the golden light of the sun to move against distant mist and light up this effect of a rainbow which is always made more vivid when it's seen against deep grey clouds.

These moments can be uplifting and transcendent. Wondrous. They're fragile, aren't they? We don't know how long they'll last. Olafur often plays with time in his artworks, so he sets up the conditions here where the rainbow flows like a river, on and on. It's our own movement in the space, as we approach the artwork and move around it, perhaps reach out to touch it, that really defines what we see and experience and understand.